Page 3 of
3 Iran's clerical
spymasters By Mahan Abedin
develop a long-term intelligence
profile on Iran by using more subtle and less
conventional means.
To recruit Iranians in
western Europe (who have easier access to their
homeland than fellow expatriates in North
America), innocuous-sounding "consultancies" were
set up in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The
work of these "consultancies" has been massively
boosted by the spread of the Internet and
electronic-mail communication
from the mid-1990s onward.
The
"consultancies" in question would not just deal
with political, economic and military matters, but
often they would request information on the
Iranian education and health systems and even such
unlikely spheres of activity as town planning,
architecture and the construction industry. The
key point is matching the requested information to
the profession, skills and social network of the
target. In many instances, the information itself
is of little or no value; what is important is to
cultivate the target - make him or her develop the
habit of volunteering information - and ultimately
task him or her to facilitate access to important
centers of knowledge and power inside Iran.
The trick is to make the target feel like
a "consultant" rather than an "informant" or
"agent". Very often the CIA has minimal contact
with the target. The relationships are handled by
subcontractors, and the CIA only assumes direct
control when the target is either beginning to
produce intelligence-quality information (or
breaching the "CX" threshold, as it is known in
British intelligence) or has managed to secure
access to people who can.
At this stage,
it is difficult to assess the extent of this
approach's successes and failures. What is beyond
doubt is that hundreds (possibly thousands) of
Iranian expatriates in western Europe, North
America and the Middle East have been effectively
recruited by the CIA (and other US intelligence
agencies) without their knowledge. Broadly
speaking, these people are highly educated and
often come from the very top of their professions;
which ranges from medicine, engineering and the
law to more politically oriented careers such as
journalism and political and military analysis.
The great majority of these people are
apolitical, and they certainly do not fit the
profile of Iranians who have any axes to grind
against the Islamic Republic. Moreover, these
activities are not directly tied to the more
overtly political programs that the US government
has promoted in recent years, such as allocating
tens of millions of dollars to promoting
"democracy" in Iran and organizing workshops for
Iranian journalists and non-governmental activists
in western Europe and Dubai.
This
"consultancy"-led approach is certainly the
gravest intelligence threat to Iran. It presents a
danger to the Islamic Republic because in its
individual constituent parts it appears innocuous
and sometimes even compatible with Iranian
interests. But in reality it is an insidious
threat that has the potential to outsmart and
overwhelm Iranian counterintelligence.
The
central challenge facing Iranian authorities is
how to manage the blurring of legitimate academic
research and consulting activities from those that
are controlled by US and other Western
intelligence services and which - at the very
least - do not have the best interests of the
country at heart.
It is a formidable
challenge and - aside from strengthening
traditional counterintelligence assets - it
requires innovative solutions. In the first
instance, the Iranian authorities ought to
consider a "Freedom of Information Act" or
something similar. At the moment no such
legislation exists, and this works to the
detriment of genuine academic researchers and
journalists. Not knowing what information is
classified and what isn't (and, equally important,
on what grounds) is terribly confusing and
promotes a culture of abuse by the intelligence
services and the judicial authorities.
By
creating a more open information society, the
Iranian government would lessen the incentive for
Western intelligence services to recruit
individual Iranians (with all the exploitation and
dangers that entails) to access information that
they cannot obtain through other means. Some of
the information that the Americans seek on Iran is
publicly available in most Western and some
Eastern countries. This approach would have the
added advantage of freeing up counterintelligence
assets to detect and disrupt more serious US and
other Western espionage activities in Iran.
Moreover, the country's media and academic
laws (both at constitutional and professional
levels) are now seriously out of step with the
development of Iran's vibrant information society,
composed of independent journalists, intrepid
academics, private consultancies, private
investigators and freelance industrial spies,
bloggers, and no fewer than 10,000
non-governmental organizations. The state no
longer has any firm control on quality
information, and it is about time it recognized
this fact.
In recent years there has even
been a proliferation of private detective agencies
in Iran, investigating anything from extramarital
affairs to fraud by company employees. And this is
despite the fact that the national parliament
(Majlis) refuses to pass a law that would legalize
the activities of such organizations.
Proper recognition for the country's
expanding private information society would
constitute the first step in revising a set of
entrenched attitudes toward what does and doesn't
constitute intelligence. While this would likely
lessen political tensions with the West, it is
unlikely to decrease more conventional and
sensitive Western intelligence operations in Iran.
(This article first appeared in SaudiDebate.com.
Published with permission.)
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